Many faculty and students at Trent University are expressing their outrage over president Bonnie Patterson's plans to radically restructure the university, including shutting down and selling Peter Robinson College and Traill College, two of Trent's popular downtown colleges.

Faculty at two of Canada's most respected religious universities were welcomed into CAUT at the November CAUT Council. Delegates endorsed the membership applications of both the faculty association at the Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax and at Saint Paul University in Ottawa.

CAUT expressed strong support for proposed federal government legislation establishing the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to replace the Medical Research Council of Canada.

While sessional teaching is playing an increasingly important role in undergraduate education, persons taking up these positions tend to perceive their labour as undervalued within the university. The work of creating, preparing and conducting new courses (often at relatively short notice) generally seems more rewarding at a personal and professional level than it is remunerative.

On Dec. 1, 1999, the members of the UBC Faculty Association voted 79 per cent in favour of bringing their collective agreements with the university under the B.C. Labour Code. The vote was precipitated by a challenge to the status of the faculty association as the legitimate bargaining agent for all its members in front of the B.C. Labour Relations Board.

Public education and public health care in Canada are at risk in the World Trade Organization. Pierre Pettigrew, Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, proclaimed in Seattle that Canadian public education and health care would not be on the table. But he presented no means by which he or the government would protect our education and health care systems from attack under the rule structures of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) which will be renegotiated starting early next year despite the failure of the recent Seattle meeting.

Delegates to CAUT's national Council meeting in mid-November passed a resolution opposing the establishment of private degree-granting universities and supporting a strong public post-secondary education system in Canada.

The war against the gender inequality in universities across North America is being waged with a sense of renewed hope thanks to the successful efforts of women in the school of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

On Nov. 8, the faculty at Laurentian University voted 89 per cent in favour of a three-year collective agreement. The settlement, retroactive to July 1, 1999, was reached after lengthy negotiations accompanied by mediation.

If the McGill University administration has its way, faculty ownership of marketable inventions at that institution will be a thing of the past. Under a proposed new intellectual property policy, such discoveries will no longer be shared jointly by the inventor and the university. Rather, the university would be the sole owner.

Following the enthusiastic response by Bishop's faculty to the Association of Professors of Bishop's University (APBU) policy of non cooperation and job action, intense negotiations resulted in a salary reopener settlement ratified by APBU members on Dec. 7.

CAUT has appointed Victoria Smallman to the newly-created position of Organizer.

Retired University of Manitoba librarian Earle Ferguson is the recipient of the 1999 CAUT Academic Librarians' Distinguished Service Award.

More than 75 university and college professors, librarians, and academic staff from faculty associations across Canada took their demands for increased post-secondary education funding to Parliament Hill last month as part of a one-day national lobby blitz organized by CAUT and the Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d'université.